Review - Ten Reasons I Won't Go Home With You: Playing The Field

In Ten Reasons I Won't Go Home With You, now playing as part of the Midtown InterNational Theatre Festival, actress/stand-up comic Kelly Nichols plays Katie, a smart, funny and single New Yorker looking to find her one true love. But as bookwriter of the show, which is inspired by her own dating highs and lows, Nichols is happy playing the field; seeking out and supervising the work of seven composer/lyricist combinations to create the score. I asked her about this unusual process for creating a new musical.

"Katie, the heroine," explains Nichols, "has made the journey from terrible experiences at high school dances through to sometimes amazing and sometimes very strange experiences in her adult life in New York. She meets guys that range from almost perfect to completely and horribly wrong. I decided to write this show With different composers/lyricists because the feel of the show is one of different vignettes for Katie, and I always thought that it would be fun, given the parallel of different guys, to get different composer/lyricist teams' takes on the scenarios. I had imagined different teams for each song, but what ended up happening was totally different, but eventually even better than I thought it would be."

She didn't have to look far to find her first collaborator. Her own voice teacher, Andrew Byrne, was an obvious choice.

"Ever since I've known Kelly, I thought how cool it would be if she combined her stand-up skills With her singing, and that's why I was excited to get to work on this piece With her. I served as the music advisor, helping Kelly select the songs and collaborators for the show; we've ended up With a terrific group of really talented composers and lyricists and I think that the voices of all the writers are blending really cohesively. The song that I contributed is called "Here We Are" and it's for a scene in which Katie is being hit on at a party by a sleazy guy and is doing her best to defend herself. It's a treat to get to write for someone you know so well and Kelly's sense of humor is so distinct that I wanted it to be featurEd Strongly."

But, as Nichols explains, finding the others was a bit like an open casting call.

"I knew almost no one who wrote the kind of music I wanted for the show. I knew very few composer/lyricists in general. So I reached out my networking fingers, got recommendations, sent out email blasts and eventually placed an ad on Playbill.com. I told everyone who responded what exactly my ideas were in the creation of this project and how quickly I needed material and people began submitting pieces for me to consider. I connected With so many talented people who were interested in contributing. It was incredible that I got the response I did. The people who ended up writing the music that we used are the people who wanted the task of creating pieces Within a limited time frame and who wrote music that really fit the sense of the show."

"Since the book was completed first, I wrote fake lyrics or monologues indicating what I wanted a song to say and where in the script I wanted it. I highlighted those portions of the text and sent the scripts to all of the composer/lyricists and asked them which song they'd like to complete. They picked the sections they felt they would be able to write for and went off to do their part of the work. It was strange for me because I've never been involved in that part of the process and I didn't know what it entailed to write a whole song. Periodically, I would get parts of lyrics or drafts of songs asking for my input and I would forward them to Andrew and see what he thought of them and we would go back and forth until the song was where we wanted it. Some of the book comes from my stand-up material and some of it is original to this project, but it has a very specific tone because of my sense of humor, so we really looked for contemporary composers who tread a fine line between heartfelt and slightly irreverent."

One of the composer/lyricists who saw the ad on Playbill.com was Bobby Cronin, who explains his side of the process:

"I had been actively looking for something to challenge myself as a writer and when I read the script, I knew the sound that was needed was more "musical theatre" than what I am used to writing. I was given the option to write a song for a couple of scenes or to write an opening number. I love writing opening numbers so I sent Kelly a draft of the song and she gave me some notes. I took those notes and changed most of the song to make it "Lucky In Love", a piece I am very excited about."

"I then got an email from Kelly asking to write a duet between the two female friends. I love writing for women so I jumped at the opportunity. I took dialogue directly from the script to give me the hook, "you deserve better than that." Again, the song called for musical comedy, Witty lyrics, and a more traditional sound; a great challenge and I happily premiered the song, "You Deserve Better" at my April Metropolitan Room concert. A week later, Kelly asked me to write another piece: the big female ballad. "You got it!," I responded, as writing female ballads are one of my favorite types of material to write. The need for the song was clear; a moment to ground the show in truth, to remove the humor that the main character uses and give the audience the pain and fears she is really facing. I wanted to play off the title of the show and decided that the song should be about the idea of some always looking for reasons that the glass is half empty. The song quickly found its sound and its title, "Reasons," but lyrics were more difficult on this one. I wrote many drafts and ended up asking lyricist Brett Teresa to give me a hand and tweak what I had written. The result is one of my favorite pieces I have written. I loved this process because I found the script to be so clear and the characters easy to understand and like."

"One would think that material from that many collaborators would be so different that the musical wouldn't have the feel of an actual complete show," explains Nichols, "and I'll admit, that was a contingency that I'd thought about, but somehow it just worked out. It sounds very existential, but I think we got exactly who we were supposed to get for this project. The music is so catchy and funny and sweet and it all fits the rest of the show and all of the other music so well. I feel like people will leave the show wanting more."

Photos of the cast of Ten Reasons I Won't Go Home With You by Jason Specland: Top: Liza Poor and Kelly Nichols; Bottom: Ryan Stadler, Marvin Riggins, Jr., Kelly Nichols and Benjamin Holmes.

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